There are many websites and apps that claim that they can “scientifically” calculate the chance of there being a snow day. Students across the world eagerly put in weather information to receive a percentage, which they quickly share with their friends.

But where does this percentage come from? It turns out that it’s mostly just based on what the programmer of the site thought was kind of accurate.

To the right now!Right foot, let’s stomp!One hop this time!Left foot, let’s stomp!

These are lyrics came from the hit dance single, The Cha Cha Slide, beloved by elementary school gym teachers.

Or did they?

Those lyrics come from a procedurally generated version of The Cha Cha Slide. It’s the first few lines of a painful 56 minutes of our new hit song, The Procedurally Generated Cha Cha Slide. The song is completely computer generated, using small audio segments from the original song. We wrote some simple Python code to combine clips in the appropriate order. This allowed us to generate as much audio as we wanted. Listen to the track in its entirety, and you’ll notice that our track is far less structured than the original.